One of the most common questions about Dell Migration Suite for SharePoint / Migration Manager for SharePoint is how long it will take to complete a migration. How many GBs per minute/hour/day can we move? The answer to these questions depends on many factors such as:

Environment – This includes factors such as hardware used and IO capabilities of front-end and back-end SharePoint servers, network topology and latency, server utilization and many other variables. SharePoint is a complex, multi-tiered technology with many moving parts, and the overall migration performance will be limited by the weakest component.

Data composition – The composition of your SharePoint sites will have a major impact on how fast they can be migrated. Generally speaking, the more objects and items you need to migrate, the longer it will take. You will see much higher transfer rates when copying document libraries with large documents compared to sites with lots of lists and list items.

Tool deployment and configuration – By deploying multiple migration hosts and utilizing multiple parallel migration jobs, you can maximize the overall migration throughput. Some aspects of SharePoint content (e.g. permissions) take more time to migrate, but might not be essential for the migration project. You can use the rich set of copy options in Dell Migration Suite/Migration Manager to balance data fidelity and migration performance.

Depending on these factors, your real-world migration performance may fluctuate significantly even within a single SharePoint installation. On the low end, you may only be able to move tens of MB per hour for sites with hundreds of lists with rich metadata, versions and permissions. On the higher end, moving up to 8-10 GB per hour of content-centric project and team sites with a highly optimized Migration Suite/Manager deployment is not unheard of. Different partitions of your SharePoint farm will fall somewhere between these extremes. The best way to understand where on the migration performance spectrum you are is to plan thoroughly by performing a series of test migrations, which need to include all types of sites.